NORTH AFRICA: Spectacular in the Sahara

The journey was exhausting, the accommodations were wretched and furious sandstorms periodically lashed the seemingly endless rows of tents. Yet hundreds of thousands of banner-waving, Koran-thumping volunteers last week continued to swarm into Morocco's southernmost town, Tarfaya. "So many people want to volunteer for the Saharan march that application forms are being sold on the black market," said one sheik who had traveled from the east-central province of Ksar es Souk. While awaiting orders to cross the Spanish Saharan border 21 miles to the south —the "go" signal may be given this week —bejeweled women and turbaned men formed semicircles around dervishes who whirled to the beat of tambourines and clapping hands. Younger marchers, sporting mirror sunglasses and carrying transistor radios, kept up a steady chant of "the Sahara belongs to us" and "the Sahara is Moroccan."

"This is a march of 350,000 people, but it is really ideas that are marching," Morocco's King Hassan II told TIME Correspondent Karsten Prager last week in his ocher palace in Marrakech. One of the ideas on the march might well be the old notion that the shortest route to enhanced power is through a neighboring country's land. In his determination to annex the phosphate-rich Spanish colony, King Hassan has ignored an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice that denied Morocco's claim of outright sovereignty over the Sahara. Spain, after promising to hold a referendum on independence among the colony's 70,000 people —mostly nomadic tribesmen—now seems willing to renege on its pledge rather than risk confrontation with the adventuristic Hassan. After a flurry of diplomatic moves, Madrid reportedly agreed last week to recognize Morocco's claim to the territory. Such an agreement may be challenged, perhaps even militarily, by Algeria, which has backed a leftist liberation movement in the Sahara. Although the marchers' objective may well be gained before they ever set foot on Saharan soil, Hassan said last week that he would be hesitant to call off the crusade. "I do not want to frustrate my subjects," he explained, "because a people is not a toy."

Hassan has reason to know. In his 14 years as monarch, he has survived three leftist plots to overthrow him and two military assassination attempts (one at his 42nd birthday party in 1971, when 98 guests were killed, and one a year later, when his official jet was strafed). The autocratic Hassan, who claims descent from the Prophet Mohammed, owes his survival to his skill at playing off one Moroccan faction against the other and rallying support through emotional appeals to the religious fervor of his 17 million subjects. The popular success of the march is a case in point.